TEA PLANTATION, CEYLON
“She liked coffee, and I liked tea,
And that is the reason we always agree!”
In the afternoon about four or five o’clock we reached Nunnoya station, where we had to change into a narrow-gauge train to finish the last part of the journey to Nuwara-Eliya. We continued to climb in shorter and more loop-like curves, being able often to gaze down on the line we had just traversed winding below like a glittering serpent among the wooded hills and tea plantations. Tea everywhere, and not a drop to drink—yet suggesting potentially more than the whole world could consume.
Something after five found us at Nuwara-Eliya where we got into a wagonette, and a good pair of greys brought us through the village to the St Andrews Hotel, a very pleasant homelike place in a nice garden and backed by beautiful woods. The original house looked as if it might have been a private residence, and there was just a touch of Rydal Mount about it and its situation, at the first glance, but a new wing had been added with a tin-roof, and there was a golf course in the valley just below.
The valley is very beautiful, with its richly wooded hills and a lake with blue mountainous distance. Delicate feathery, aspen-like trees wave in the soft air, and there are numbers of firs and cypresses which give an Italian touch to the landscape, but no palms. In fact, the whole character of the country is totally different from Colombo and Kandy. The climate, too, is much cooler, the thermometer falling to 40 degrees at night, or even to frost, though the sun is hot enough in the middle of the day.
There is a native bazaar, and an English quarter with a red club house, tennis courts, and a race-course—of course. St Andrews, however, where we were quartered, was quite away by itself, and was altogether perhaps the pleasantest place we had stayed at either in India or Ceylon. It was possible, for one thing, to walk out without being worried by guides and touts, or to buy things. The climate was delightful after the enervating heat of Colombo, and there being hardly any other guests the quiet of the place was a great relief and very restful.
One afternoon we had a walk up the opposite hills, the track being mostly through tea-plantations, with forest bits occasionally. The tea tree left to itself apparently grows high on a stem, having a very striking character and shape, suggesting almost the stone-pine. The small, thick-stemmed, closely-trimmed, flat-headed dwarf bushes which are its characteristic forms in the tea plantations also have an interesting effect in some situations on the hill-sides, intersected by wandering paths whereon the dark natives move up and down. The tea-plant has a leaf somewhat of the character of a laurel or orange tree, and its flower recalls that of the orange. Ceylon tea when made is of a beautiful clear orange colour—I mean when poured from the pot.
The Hagdalla gardens, founded by the government in 1861, well repay a visit, and are deeply interesting to anyone interested in the flora of Ceylon. It is a drive of about six miles; passing through the native village, and by the English Club and race-course, the lake is skirted, and after that the road takes the character rather of a mountain pass, and runs along the edge of a deep wooded ravine down which a rocky stream tumbles into falls over boulders. There was just a touch of a sort of Borrowdale, translated into Cingalee, about this part of the drive. The wild forest which clad the hills each side of the valley was very different in character and colour to anything seen in Europe, the trees showed the most lovely tints of varied bronze, from pale green to copper red. The tea tree was abundant, and the rhododendron, which here is totally different in character and general shape to the cultivated shrub-like bushes in English gardens. Here it is a thick-stemmed tree, with a rugged bark, and a bold irregular outline with rather sparse leavage and deep crimson flowers which glow splendidly among the dark metallic green of the leaves. There is a sort of formal grotesqueness about the tree, too, which is rather Chinese.
On the way through the ravine, at a solitary spot below the road, we saw a Buddhist shrine. On a little platform surrounded by a rough fence of loose stones, and facing the road, was a row of carved images, in some dark wood, standing figures of Buddha. In front of this rude structure we saw a native worshipper prostrating himself on the edge of the road, and bowing and bending towards the shrine.
The Magdalla gardens are botanic and horticultural gardens laid out with great care and skill on the slope of a mountain. They apparently contain all the varieties of trees and plants indigenous to Ceylon. Tree ferns are there in abundance, flowering trees of many kinds, and parasitic plants, and orchids in great variety, growing in their natural manner. As one threads the narrow wandering paths it is as if one passed through a thick jungle or tropical forest, only that the walking is made easy, and botanical labels here and there, and signs of gardener’s care and labour, remind one it is a garden.